Women in the small town of Barbacaos, southwest Colombia, have reportedly gone on their second sex strike in two years, demanding that the roads to their remote region be repaved.

Dubbed the ‘crossed legs movement,’ the women in the town are refusing to have sex with their significant others until the road that connects their small, isolated town to the rest of the country is repaired, according to Colombia-based reporter John Otis.

And it might have actually worked. PRI reports that construction has resumed on the single road, which is in such poor condition that trips to the nearest hospital take up to 14 hours, and many people in need of care die along the way.

‘If you’re going to send a container of Colombian goods to China, it will cost you more to bring it to a Colombian port than to get it from that Colombian port all the way across the other side of the world to China,’ Mr Otis explained.

Women in the town first began withholding sex in 2011 to protest the poor condition of the road, where Judge Marybell Silva joined the strike after seeing a young woman die along with her unborn child because the ambulance got stuck on the road and failed to reach a hospital in time.

Strike leader Ruby Quinonez said at the time: ‘Why bring children into this world when they can just die without medical attention and we can’t even offer them the most basic rights? We decided to stop having sex and stop having children until the state fulfills its previous promises.’

After three months and 19 days of abstinence, town politicians promised the road would be repaired and the government pledged $21million to pave at least half of the 35-mile road.

But after two years and no change, women resumed the strike. Now it seems the Army Corps of Engineers have brought in bulldozers and ‘heavy machinery’ to prove  they will indeed rebuild the road.

But completion of the project, and simple maintenance of roads in Colombia, means working against difficult terrain, such as in the Andes mountains, and a decade-old guerrilla war.

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